Almansur: Jolly Rogers with few Bones

ONE WAR, TWO JOLLIES, FEW BONES

With the disestablishment of Tom Blackburn's VF-17, the skull and crossbones insignia of the Jolly Rogers vanishes for some months, although two squadrons will later claim the name and heritage.

The home plate of the original Jolly Rogers, the USS Bunker Hill, was assigned a new airwing in the form of CVG-84. CVG-84 had a Navy fighter squadron, VF-84, established in 1 May 1944, and equipped with the Vought F4U-1D Corsair, plus a small detachment of Grumman F6F-5N Hellcat night-fighters and F6F-5P photo birds.

This is where things start getting complicated. The Commanding Officer of the new squadron is none other than Roger Hedrick, who had been Tom Blackburn's Executive Officer in VF-17, and many of his core pilots were former Jolly Rogers as well. It might be possible that Jolly Rogers patches were in abundance, however known pictures of VF-84 birds show no Bones at all. It has been said that Roger Hedrick put up a formal request for the new squadron to take on the Jolly Rogers name, but was denied permission, since by then there was a new VF-17 in existence.

Bunker Hill's airwing was heavily engaged in the fight over Okinawa. It will later be claimed that amongst the VF-84 pilots there was one Ensign by the name of Jack Ernie, who got shot down and whose last radio request as he went down was to be "remembered with the Jolly Rogers".

After many years chasing the elusive ENS Jack Ernie, I am inclined to believe that this is a fairy tale, but more on that when I discuss the takeover of the VF-84 Vagabonds by the former Jolly Rogers of VF-61 in late 1959.

As a sad footnote, Bunker Hill was seriously damaged by a Kamikaze raid on 11 May 1945. Many pilots and other personnel of VF-84 lost their lives on that day. The unit was disestablished on 8 October 1945.

As mentioned, at the same time there was an active squadron by the name of VF-17. Although CDR Tom Blackburn's VF-17 was disestablished on 10 April 1944, some months later a new squadron took that designation. It was formed on the West Coast under the leadership of LCDR Marshall Beebee, and flew the Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat from the USS Hornet during the Tokyo raids of 1945. No personnel of Blackburn's VF-17 was involved, and it seems that the Jolly Rogers tradition was slow to take root.

It has been said that the Bones were not painted in the vast majority of the new VF-17's Hellcats for a simple, practical reason: the squadron pooled its aircraft aboard the Hornet with VBF-17, the fighter bomber component, and this sharing prevented the personalization of the birds. This is a valid explanation, but there is also a simpler one: as the siege of Japan grew ever tighter, and the number of aircraft carriers in the theater became larger, the potential for confusion was increased many fold. Squadrons and airwings were now operating on a multi-carrier scenario, and the need to keep the integrity of the airwings in their own carriers demanded a greater identification effort. The confidential technical letter 2CTL-45, from 27 January 1945, mandated the painting of airwing-specific geometric patterns on the tail and wings of the aircraft. It was an order that had to be enforced with great discipline, and other types of personalization suffered in consequence throughout the fleet.

Only a few VF-17 Hellcats are positively known to have flown with the Jolly Rogers' flag. As was the norm for squadron insignia on Hellcats at the time, this was rather small and located on the fuselage under, and slightly ahead of, the windscreen. You really need to be looking to locate the flag on the few F6F that flew it from the Hornet in 1945. Best known for it is the aircraft with the side number 35. You can also see it on side number 21, although it is even harder to do so.

The Bones made a full comeback by the very end of WW II, when VF-17 converted to the Vought F4U-4 Corsair, flying from the new USS Midway. The insignia, reverting to the tradition of Tom Blackburn's Jolly Rogers, was painted on the cowling. The following, very rare, photo of a VF-17's F4U-4 was taken by Robert O'Dell, and was hijacked from an out-of-print book, in the name of science and corsair traditions.

Another of these Midway's Corsairs is shown on less than desirable circumstances:

The Grumman F8F-1 Bearcat was briefly used by the fighter and fighter bomber elements of CVG-17, as proven by the photograph bellow, where, once more, the Bones are absent. This happened just before Midway's Artic cruise of 1946, but records indicate that the airwing deployed with the F4U-4. My belief is that the logistics of post-war Navy reorganization denied VF-17 its shot at full conversion to the Bearcat. The Corsair was still the mount of choice for the fighter bomber role, and it would have been harder to retain the F4U-4 for VBF-17 and introduce a new type just for VF-17.

VF-17 was redesignated VF-5B in 1946.

Thanks to my friend Andrew Desautels for his corrections to the original script of this chapter.